It is effective for culturing cells to use a scaffold material suited to the cells. However, when a device is employed, there are a lot of limitations in connection with a process for manufacturing the device.
With regard to cells of organs other than the liver, in many cases, one cell has one function. On the other hand, with regard to liver cells in the liver, one liver cell has 100 or more specific functions.
However, cultured liver cells so far have not been capable of maintaining or exhibiting most of their functions. For example, many studies on a bio-artificial liver system have been conducted, but in these studies, most of drug metabolisms have not been realized.
The present inventors have reported that high liver functions are expressed by using a co-culture system of endothelial cells and hepatic parenchymal cells which forms a network structure due to the selection of a scaffold material (see Non-Patent Documents 1 and 2).